Summary
The Frog is a tame serial killer thriller that could have lived up to its title with some bolder leaps here and there.
The Frog continues a loose trend I’d vaguely describe as the Westernization of Korean television. It’s not necessarily something you’d notice unless you watch as many K-Dramas as I do, but the clues are there, especially on Netflix. Whereas the weekly shows, which just internationally distribute stuff airing on Korean channels, maintain the very specific oddball qualities of the nation’s output, the binge-drop limited series have increasingly become pastiches of popular Western formats and formulas.
You can, as ever, blame Squid Game for this, as well as Parasite, which remain – by far – the two most prominent examples of South Korean film and television creeping into the mainstream. And as soon as the deep-pocketed executives get wind of something being successful, the result is a lot of pitch meetings that revolve, roughly, around someone saying, “What about a Korean version of [insert popular show here]?”
This is why Narco-Saints was basically Korean Narcos, and The Whirlwind was Korean House of Cards, and Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area was… well, Korean Money Heist. It’s also why The Frog is a Korean David Fincher serial killer thriller, pretty openly.
None of this is bad, per se – several of the shows above are very good – but it is largely uninteresting, and so is The Frog. Despite an ambitious dual timeline narrative and a lot of mystery in the early going that’ll shuffle viewers through, it’s mostly just a pastiche that uses deliberate obfuscation to keep people watching because they expect a cleverer payoff down the line.
The Frog | Image via Netflix
Premise-wise, the plot revolves around two parallel narratives set twenty years apart. In 2001, Gu Sang-jun (Yoon Kye-sang) insists a man spend the night in his hotel, only to discover he’s a serial killer. In 2021, Jeon Young-ha (Kim Yoon-seok), who runs a lonely rural holiday rental in the middle of nowhere, welcomes an unexpected woman and child into the property who subsequently disappear, leaving a trail of suspicious evidence. Assuming the worst, Young-ha covers up what he perceives to be the child’s murder and then carries on as normal – until the woman, Yoo Seong-a (Go Min-si), returns for another surprise stay.
These threads are united by Yoon Bo-min, a detective whose job is to figure out what’s going on and why, including how the two cases are linked.
The Frog looks a lot better than it is. It’s handsomely shot and artfully embellished, and I appreciated the fact it was well-lit instead of deliberately, annoyingly dark. There’s no reason heinous crimes can’t happen in broad daylight, right? Cutesy needle-drops and other flourishes do give the demeanor of a much more sophisticated show than I think The Frog can claim to be. But it’s lacking in some other areas.
The performances are a big one. There are some wild moments of overacting that pull the viewer out of the experience immediately and at a rate that could potentially induce whiplash, and the villainess turn from Go Min-si is flat, lacking the charisma and sometimes terror we’ve seen from similar performances in the past.
Die-hard genre fans are likely to get something out of The Frog either way, as there are enough twists and turns to satisfy, even if they aren’t always as coherent as they could be. But it’s hard not to be disappointed by how obviously this show evokes other, better ones, and more than a few classic movies, without carving out an identity of its own.
RELATED:
